Reflections On The Turning Tide, And Time

Susan Campbell

July 16, 1997|By SUSAN CAMPBELL

I am walking down a Rhode Island beach just at high-tide mark, where the sand is packed enough to give me traction but soft enough to feel like a very firm mattress.

There's a chunk of rose-colored quartz in the sand, and I unearth (unsand?) it with my toe. As I bend to pick it up, a wave sneaks up and nearly pushes me over. I catch myself and look over to see five Rhode Island Spice Girls-types splashing and kicking water at each other. I guess you could call it cavorting, but it's a studied kind of play. They look like they are auditioning for a toothpaste commercial, their tummies tucked, their hair artfully tousled, their cries just loud enough to attract the attention of three long- haired surfer boys who are pretending lack of interest on raggedy towels. One of the girls keeps looking at the boys and then rolling her eyes and going back to her water games, as if the boys' presence is a distraction and she half-resents it.

I grab my rock, and two thoughts race to the surface. One is envy, the second relief. Who wouldn't envy those girls their young bodies and their young lives? Not only do their bathing suits look good on them, they also have so much to look forward to: their driver's licenses, college, the idea that one day when they come home from work, someone will be happy to see them. And, in the short term, maybe one of those boys will saunter over, and they will fall in love, and the world will turn for them and them only. They have their whole lives ahead of them, as if I don't, as if everything important in my life is in the past and I am left with just the memories.

The second thought is relief because I don't have to compete with those girls any more. I wasn't very good at it anyway when it was my turn to cavort in the surf. For all my showing off and pretending that I didn't care who saw me, I can remember only two times when a boy from the towels came over to talk. Once, the guy was dating a friend of mine, and he thought he recognized me. Another time, after I entertained an entire table with my impressions of our high school teachers, a guy actually sat down by me at the Pizza Hut. He didn't talk much, but he smiled a lot, and I sat there drinking in the smell of his letter jacket and his Brut cologne.

But that was that, and the pain of being dumped before I was even picked up was almost more than I could bear. Now, thankfully, I have joined the round-bellies, those people on whom gravity and time have worked their wonders. We round- bellies may have had it in the past, but it's all shifted now, and nowhere is that more obvious than on the beach. Everything is heading south, and one day the females among us will be round-but-wrinkled ladies who live in our bathing suits from May through September. One day I will open my closet door, and all that will be in there will be two pairs of dirty-white sneakers with holes cut out for the bunions, a few house dresses -- billowy shifts with sprays of flowers on them -- and a rack of 15 swimsuits all the same style and color.

I already have my suit picked out. It is navy blue with white piping and a tiny skirt around the bottom -- more of a ruffle, really. And when I peel it off at the end of the day, it will stand up on its own, being reinforced with the modern-day version of whalebone.

One of the guys gets up and wades into the water, not too close to the girls, but not too far, either. His friends on their towels watch him with half-smiles on their faces. The chase has begun, and only years from now, when someone is telling the story of how they met, will they admit that the whole thing started with the girls' wooing by default. That got the boys up off their towels. My own towel up the beach has probably by now blown over to the overfull trash can. Over the course of the day, people have stacked their bottles and cans and plastic-foam dinner plates to an unbelievable height. It almost looks like art.

I've got my quartz, and if I stand here watching the boy-girl game much longer, I'll look weird. I go find my towel, where rests nearby a guy who will actually talk to me, and I don't have to cavort and show off, either.